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To paraphrase Dostoevsky, one can measure the degree of civilization in a country by traveling its roads.
I learned this the hard way on a recent reporting trip to Finland. To catch my departing flight, first I had to rent a car to drive from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Newark airport. Then, en route, not only did I have to deal with the usual stress of having to balance the risk of getting a speeding ticket against the risk of getting into an accident by driving too slowly, I also got to meet some deranged hooligans straight out of “Mad Max.” Perhaps 15 or 20 souped-up cars and trucks, with deafening glass packs and side-dump exhausts, appeared suddenly around Stroudsburg, driving perhaps 100 miles per hour, weaving between lanes and onto the shoulder. One of them abruptly cut me off, nearly causing me to crash into another car.
It’s a familiar experience for anyone who drives, bikes, or walks on an American street. Hyper-vigilance is the natural response to roads filled with big, heavy, powerful cars and trucks driven at high speed, and often by people with a contemptuous disregard for anything but their own convenience and kicks.
So when I got to Finland to pick up a rental car, I was still amped. It’s a foreign country, and getting to my hotel meant I had to drive through the middle of the capital city. Surely this would be difficult.
It was not. I was surprised to learn that driving in downtown Helsinki is actually quite easy and safe — and later as I walked around the city, so is walking, cycling, or riding an electric scooter. What’s more, most of the road design policies that have made it so easy and safe to move around, drastically reducing carbon emissions in the process, are relatively simple. Even a sprawling American suburb could adopt most of them, with great effect.
The first and most important policy is to slow down traffic in towns and cities. Finland does have high-speed highways, but the speed limit only hits 120 kilometers per hour (about 75 miles per hour) far outside any settlement and only during the summer. Elsewhere, limits have been progressively reduced over the years. In the Helsinki suburbs, a limit of 80 kph, or 50 mph, is enforced with speed cameras. Further into the city, as the roads pick up more traffic and become more complex, the highway speed drops to 60 kph (37 mph), or even 50 kph (31 mph). On local city streets, the limit drops to 30 kph (18 mph), and most streets are narrow and paved with rough stone that, together with raised crosswalks, effectively force people to drive even slower.
A Finnish speeding ticket, which is levied as a percentage of one’s income, is no joke. Back in June, a wealthy businessman named Anders Wiklöf was fined121,000 euros for doing 82 kph in a 50 kph zone. “I really regret the matter,” he told a local newspaper.
Thanks to those stiff and all-but-guaranteed fines, people hardly ever speed, and as a result, driving is much easier and safer. You’ve got plenty of time to change lanes, react to other cars, and figure out where you need to go. It’s actually rather pleasant. Without the white-knuckle American road culture, you can actually relax and enjoy the driving experience, even in the big city.
Low speeds are also central to pedestrian and cyclist safety on city streets. People are driving so slowly that even if someone darts right out in front of a driver, there is still usually enough time to stop. And if a collision does happen, lower speeds are exponentially safer for everyone involved. One study estimated that the risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at 26 kph (16 mph) was about 10 percent, but that increased to 90 percent at 74 kph (46 mph).
The second policy is to provide separate dedicated space for pedestrians, bikes, and public transit. Larger Helsinki streets typically have a sidewalk divided between a pedestrian section and a bike section, a lane for cars, and then a separated tram lane. This means less conflict between pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and trams — and critically, the trams don’t get stuck in traffic. That means they can bypass any traffic congestion, and so those who don’t need or want to drive will logically opt to take public transit instead, thus letting the car lanes breathe. On smaller side streets, low speeds mean the city can forgo controls of any kind. Many Helsinki intersections don’t have so much as a stop sign; people just have to watch each other and negotiate on the fly — and it works.
Taken together, all this helps create a culture of walking, cycling, and transit use that is safer, healthier, and more efficient. Thanks to these reforms, Helsinki cut its annual pedestrian fatalities from 84 in 1965 to zero in 2019 (though there have been a couple in the subsequent years). Nationally, last year saw the lowest number of traffic deaths ever recorded. Meanwhile, cutting down on automobile trips is part of how Finland slashed its carbon dioxide emissions per capita by about half, from 14 metric tons in 2003 to 7 tons in 2021, as compared to 15 tons in America.
It’s also just more wholesome. Once it sunk in that I was about as safe as it is possible to be on a street, and didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder every few seconds to watch out for a careening 4-ton pickup truck, I felt the sense of peace that comes from releasing a worry that has been there for so long you’d forgotten what it was like to exist without it. Rather than being perceived as some irritating interloper getting in the way of drivers, I felt that I belonged on the street as much as anyone else. Conversely, I started viewing drivers, who invariably stop when anyone approaches a crosswalk, as fellow human beings rather than probable speed-crazed maniacs bent on running me down.
This safety no doubt helps explain why compared to an American city, one sees children on the street far more frequently in Helsinki; either big packs of young schoolchildren wearing high-visibility vests, shepherded by a couple adults, or kids from about seven and up out by themselves or in groups. And that’s despite the fact that the American birthrate is substantially higher than Finland’s. No doubt part of the reason for children being absent from the street is America’s hyper-neurotic parenting culture, but that culture is also fueled by the quite rational worry that unsupervised kids will be obliterated by a speeding lunatic.
It all sounds pretty fancy. But I want to emphasize that Helsinki is not really on the urbanist cutting edge. It still has some wide “stroads” here and there, and compared to, say, Amsterdam it is still relatively car-centric. But that also means that it isn’t too far off from the American city average.
Now, of course America couldn’t simply copy-paste every one of Finland road policies. We have neither the political will nor the administrative capacity to impose six-digit fines on rich jerks speeding through school zones in their Porsche Cayennes. It’s also hard to imagine the kind of stiff taxes on vehicle ownership and gasoline (about three dollars a gallon) that also makes driving much more expensive.
But we could have automatically enforced speed limits. New York City, for example, recently turned its (very limited) collection of speed cameras on continuously, after long delays from car-brained officials. Sure enough, speeding fell sharply along with traffic injuries and deaths of all kinds. We could also reclaim some road space for bike lanes and trams — or even just buses. The average suburban arterial has more than enough space, and e-bikes make many bike trips possible even in low-density sprawl.
Studies demonstrate that a substantial and growing fraction of Americans want to be able to live car-free. Another larger fraction would simply like the option to avoid driving if they don’t want to. The reason so many don’t is the risk. Make walking and cycling safe, and millions more will do it. We wouldn’t make it all the way to Finland’s level without the rest of its policies, but we’d get fairly far.
When reformers propose Finland-style changes to American cities, drivers commonly complain that it would cut into their freedom. But you can still drive just about anywhere in Finland, if you want to. Indeed, it’s much easier and safer to do so than it is in American cities. We have about the worst of all possible worlds, where we’re so dedicated to car supremacy that we’ve made our cities a dangerous, stressful, polluted hellscape even for drivers. There’s a better way.
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.